40th NAACP Image Awards on Fox TV Feb 12 at 8PM

Since Roger Moore over at the Orlando Sentinel mentioned the NAACP Image Awards being on BET, I thought I would point out they are on Fox TV, 8pm Thursday, Feb 12 (check the schedule here).

And for those who are late joining the party, Dare Not Walk Alone is up for an award: Outstanding Documentary. The competition is stiff: CNN, ESPN, HBO, and an Oscar-nominated indie film, Trouble the Waters. We are hoping that the nomination of DNWA will raise awareness of the film, whether it wins or not.

Why Satellite Internet Is Not Really Broadband

I recently posted a review of HughesNet satellite Internet service over at DSLReports. You may need to sign up to read it--which is totally worth the effort, DSLReports is a great source of info and news for bandwidth hungry net surfers--but I am also posting it here for ease of access:

Pros "Downloading is quite fast (but capped)"
Cons "Poor latency, 13Gb monthly cap, costly, flaky DNS, not true broadband"

Despite the fact that there is Verizon fiber optic at the end of my drive and Road Runner cable about 3 miles away, I cannot persuade anyone to run a broadband line to our home/office near Cooperstown in upstate New York (unless I pay $1,000 per month for a T1).

So, we pay HughesNet $80 per month even though it does not fit my definition of broadband (e.g. does not support VoIP, VPN or watching Netflix on demand movies).

Although traffic is fast enough when it gets going (from 1 to 1.5Mbs down) the latency is terrible (around 500ms, way slower than dialup) and if we exceed 435 megabytes downloaded in a day we are stuffed for 24 hours (Hughes actually slows your connection down to dialup speed--a death sentence if your boss wants you to take a quick look at his big deck of Powerpoint slides).

I should point out that the latency is not the "fault" of HughesNet but rather an unsolvable limitation when sending signals into space and back. This creates a huge overhead for things like logging into your bank account (what takes 20 seconds on true broadband takes 70 seconds on satellite). Doing online bill payment becomes a very tedious chore.

Hughes warns you not to try VoIP or VPN because of the latency, but does not make this clear in their TV ads. They also fail to give sufficient warning about the practical effect of bandwidth limits. For example, recent automatic operating system upgrades from Apple and Microsoft have both blown out our daily limit. Needless to say you have to turn off automatic OS upgrades, which potentially puts your system at risk.

HughesNet does offer a form of unlimited download, limited to between 3AM and 6AM. But we have found the speed and connection to be flaky when using this "feature." For example, you set up your download manager to get that big 600Mb file from your boss at 3AM but the connection flakes out and when you get up at 8AM you find most of the file arrived between 6 and 7 thus blowing out your allowance for the day.

There is also a problem with DNS flakiness (as reported by others in this forum). Random sites report DNS lookup errors but they are online. This was particularly weird when I found I could not get to my own web site over the HughesNet DNS servers for well over a week. If I used alternative DNS over Hughes, like running Anonymizer, I was able to see my site, as were friends on other ISP connections. I have a video of that issue here.

As a geek I am still amazed that I have a satellite uplink hanging off my porch that actually sends and receives, but that does not make up for the painful price/performance ratio and vicious bandwidth caps.

After a year on HughesNet I am devoting every spare moment to exploring my options (like getting that T1 and blasting WiMax out to all my neighbors--who have the same problems I do with satellite).

Bottom Line: "Should not be sold as broadband (no VPN, VoIP, OS upgrades, or movies)"

More for Virgins, Less for Screw-ups: The surprising cost of data breaches

In its fourth annual study on data breaches, the Ponemon Institute examined the costs of 43 companies that had been hit by a data breach. The study found, not surprisingly, that the cost per record breached had risen (actual numbers coming up).

I have always thought it ironic that one of the biggest obstacles to getting organizations to take action on issues of data privacy and security is a lack of data, namely data about what a security failure might cost. If known, that cost can then be weighed against the cost of putting security measures in place.

After all, Adam and Eve did not cover their bodies in the garden of Eden,  likewise organizations operating in crime-free utopias have no need to spend money to protect against data exposures. In the real world, however it is sad but true that a certain percentage of people are not sufficiently constrained by either personal ethics or a fear of consequences and go about steal data for personal gain.

Thus the need for security spending to avoid the costs, which are now averaging over $200 per record. So, next time you read a story about some bank or retailer exposing thousands of records, you can just multiply by $200 to figure the hit they have just taken).

This study is more good work by Larry Ponemon and the Ponemon Institute. Consistently reliable data over time is particularly useful. For example, if you read up on all the data breaches that have been happening you might have formed the impression that more of them are now coming from third parties, i.e. people who process customer data for retailers, banks, etc. And the survey shows that yes, third party data breaches were reported by more organizations in 2008 than in 2005 (21% then, 44% now). Less predictable perhaps is the finding that third party data breaches are more expensive, $231 per compromised record versus an overall average of $202.

As you might expect, breaches experienced by data loss "virgins" are more costly, $243 versus $192 for "experienced" companies, sardonically referred to as "repeat data screw-ups" by Larry Dignan in the TechRepublic blog post referenced at the beginning of this post. What surprised and saddened me is that more than 84% of all cases examined by Larry Ponemon's team were repeat data breach offenders.

Sadly, until there is an uptick in the general standards of human behavior, things are likely to carry on like this. Data entrusted to the feckless will be exposed by the lawless, innocent lives will be disrupted, money will be lost, and the cost to defend against miscreants will mount.

Blog Backlog: Computer Security Handbook 5th Edition Launches

I got a nice nod last week from Norwich University in an article about Wiley's soon to be launched 2,000 page behemoth: "Computer Security Handbook, 5th Edition."

It turns out that 37 of the 80 chapters are by people with Norwich connections. That includes me (Chapters 4, 7, 15, 20) and Chey (Chapters 15, 41, 73).

Although I got interviewed for the article, to highlight cooperation between Norwich professors and students, I kind of wish they had also mentioned Chey. She wrote a lot of the curriculum material for the original Master of Science in Information Assurance at Norwich. And I think she and I are the only couple to work together on a chapter in the new opus (Chapter 15: Penetrating Computer Systems and Networks, also with Mich Kabay).

On the whole, David Corriveau did a good job with the article. Hopefully, my comments conveyed the fact that Mich Kabay should get the credit my collaboration with Corinne LeFrançois at the NSA. It was a classic electronic encounter. Pure email, we never met in person. (It is worth noting that I also met Mich online, about twenty years ago, while I was living in Scotland and he was living in Montreal. That was back in the days of CompuServe.)

Mich is the one is the thread that runs through all of this, the MSIA program and the Computer Security Handbook, both CSH4 and CSH5. And with that, we wish the best of luck to "Computer Security Handbook 5th Edition" and all who sail in her!

Blog Backlog: A shout out to the frozen ones

[Looking for the home page of the Stephen Cobb Blog? Please click here.]

Author's note: I feel passionately about this topic, so the language below is a bit edgy. However, revisiting this page seven years later it strikes me that my anger is still justified. I still haven't heard a socially responsible reason for not putting power lines underground, where they belong. I first wrote this while living in a rural area, but vast swathes of urban and suburban America still rely on exposed power lines strung between poles. Later when we moved to San Diego I read about that city's plan to put all utility lines underground. Why don't more cities do this?

Anyway, here's what I wrote in the winter of oh nine: Did the blogosphere or the wider economy register a dip in activity last week due to people not blogging because the power was out due to freezing rain? (I suspect tweeting from smartphones picked up the slack for some, at least while the batteries lasted.)

One headline said a million homes were without power. That's sad. And it is tough for all affected. But what really struck me about last week was the UTTER STUPIDITY OF DOWNED POWER LINES.

A million homes without power? Come on America, we can do better than that. Scores of deaths due to mistakes with make-do heating arrangements? Why? Because collectively speaking our country is too greedy/dumb/short-sighted to bury the power lines.

I'm not saying I'm angry about this, but I'm about ready to slap the first person who says "It costs to much." Compared to WHAT? The lives lost? The money wasted? The huge cost of repairs? The lost votes of utility workers who will have to be retrained when we bury the lines?

And don't dare say "It can't be done." There are thousands of farms in North Dakota that never lose power in an ice storm. Why? Their lines were buried decades ago thanks to co-ops and the Rural Electrification Act (click that link and you can see FDR signing it).

Now is the time to tell non-cooperative utility companies to dig in or give in. Their right to run lines through our towns and villages can be revoked. There is no technical reason this cannot be done. Image what the news of the future could be:

"Worst ice storm in history, few lose power, no deaths reported, business as usual for most."

I don't presume to know exactly why the lines are not buried. Is it really because  line-persons have a strong lobby? What I do know is that whole swathes of commercial and residential development in Northern Virginia have zero overhead lines because of zoning. Having lived there for a while it was weird to hear the news reports of massive outages in neighboring areas due to wind or ice while our power flowed uninterrupted.

So, if you happen to know anyone in the new administration, please pass along the idea that life doesn't have to be this way, hanging by a thread that ice might break. Bury the lines and boost the economy while saving lives. What could be better than that.

Notes:

• The recent power outages were the worst in Kentucky history. HughesNet has a NOC in Kentucky. Maybe that's why their DNS is foobar and my blog was blocked so I couldn't post this about 3 days ago.


• The photo above is ice at the entrance to an ice cave in a glacier in Iceland. Why use that? We have no frozen power lines to photograph on our property--the man who built the place was smart, he buried them.

From Warm Engine to Hot Laptop: Saturdays now and then

So, I spent this Saturday fixing things. First there was the font problem with my blog, a classic case of a web site  looking fine in every browser but Internet Explorer. I finally cracked the right code in the css file to get it to look right in IE as well as the other browsers (change font size from 60% to 10pix).

Then there was the problem of actually getting to my web site, which has been "off the radar" lately where radar = surfing on a HughesNet satellite connection. I am writing this post by running Anonymizer and routing my browser through their servers because Hughes obviously has a serious DNS problem that I am not going to solve by calling their tech support folks in India. All of which got me thinking about my how my Dad spent his Saturday mornings...

Hacking My Way to My Own Blog: Anonymously

Well, I'm back...after 4 days of being kept from my own web site by my ISP, the increasingly notorious HughesNet, about which I have written before. In fact, I still can't surf to my blog, unless I use a proxy server and bypass the HughesNet DNS.

So I am running Anonymizer, a very clever program that lets you surf the web without revealing your IP address. The program does this by routing your browser's requests to visit a web site, like my blog, through its own DNS servers, thereby avoiding, in my case, the apparently foobar DNS at HughesNet. There are other ways of doing this, like surfing via anonymouse.org, but they tend to flash ads on the screen to pay for their service. Alternatively, you can buy a subscription. What I'm doing right now is use a 7-day free trial of Anonymizer.

Let me make this clear, I am using a 7-day free trial of Anonymizer so I can get to my own web site. I have not called HughesNet about this problem (calls to HughesNet support should be avoided by people with high blood pressure according to my reading of the Hughes forum on DSLReports). In a few days I am headed down the Monetate office in Conshohoken for a week. I know I can reach my blog from there. When I get back I will see if the problem as gone away.

p.s. So far I am liking Anonymizer. It has a simple interface for turning the service on and off and it manages to do this without disrupting browsers sessions.

Moving Mountains

Recently I made a comment on Twitter about my wife moving mountains. Figured I better post some evidence to back that up.

Here she is moving a mountain of snow from our yard. That's a 400cc Arctic Cat 4 wheel drive ATV that Chey is wrangling, without the benefit of power steering. It's locked in Low with chains on the rear tires and a Warn plow on the front.

Who would have thought, back when we met, nearly a quarter of a century ago, sipping cappuccino in a North Beach coffee shop, that we would one day find ourselves living on the side of an 'almost mountain' and one of us would be really good at snow plowing. Of course, I should have got a hint when one of us took up off-road desert racing and entered one of the toughest races in the world. Only later did I found out the reason she got a good deal on the dune buggy she put together for this: It had been in the race the year before and did about four somersaults when it hit a rock and left the track. The driver walked away, so I guess it was a good deal. Anyway, here it is in action, smoking another buggy off the line at the start of the Finke Desert Race 2000. Click, if you like,  for a very short video with really bad sound.

Top Gear's Clarkson Faces Head Gear Challenge

ROSEBOOM, N.Y., Jan. 22 /Newzwire/ -- Known for being over-the-top in deed and word, Jeremy Clarkson, presenter of the BBC hit series "Top Gear" may be facing a challenge for the 'top spot' when it comes to winter head gear.

Clarkson, seen it the top half of the image on the left, famously wore an elaborate fur hat for a recent cold weather motoring adventure.

But spy photos of a recently spotted winter head gear classic are now appearing (see bottom half of image on left) which may lay claim to the top-head-gear crown.

Described by one millinery aficionado as "a classic, full of the elegance that comes from simple lines and the very best in raw materials," this design is beautifully executed in seal skin. The hat is reported to be 50 years old, of a type once produced for the Hudson Bay Company in Canada.

Little is known about the current owner although he is rumored to have inherited the hat from his father, an engineer who spent time working on automative projects in Detroit and Ohio in the late 1950s.

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A Cool Place: City Coffee Company in America's oldest city

Okay, so Saint Augustine is not exactly America's oldest city, it is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in North America (founded 1563).

But the City Coffee Company, founded 2008, is exactly what a coffee shop should be. Good coffee, good pastry, good sandwiches, and free WiFi, from 6AM to 6PM weekdays (slightly shorter hours on the weekend). Add to that a rocking soundtrack that slides into some raw blues later in the day, and you have a great place to hang out, lunch out, or log in. Which is what I am doing at the moment, during my brief [and chilly] visit to Florida.

Of particular note are the bear claws [served warm], the breakfast burrito [served all day] and the latte [served on the dry side, which I like]. Speaking of which, I should buy another latte to 'pay' for this WiFi that I am gobbling up. Yum!